Accurately and affordably mapping soil properties within a field has proven challenging for precision agriculture practitioners. The sampling density needed to capture small spatial scale variability is impractical using conventional sampling and analysis methods. Those methods involve the insertion of a soil probe into the soil, retracting the probe, removing the soil from the probe, placing the soil into a bag, repeating the process until the bag contains typically 5 to 10 cores, labeling the bag, and sending the composited cores to a soil testing laboratory where the soil is removed, ground, dried, and analyzed.
One of the main hindrances in analyzing soil on-the-go is that most analysis technology requires a certain length of time for an analysis to be completed. Movement of sensors across or through the soil means that sensors do not have the requisite time to measure the soil property of interest. Durability of the analysis equipment is another problem. Abrasion and damage from rocks and other field debris could cause significant damage to most lab sensors. If the soil sample can be extracted on-the-go, and immobilized for measurement, the problems of time and durability are both significantly reduced.
Automated soil collection devices have been developed that collect samples for submission to a soil testing laboratory. These devices provide advantages over the time-consuming and laborious practice of conventional core sampling described above. However, sending a large number of collected samples to a soil testing laboratory to map a field with a desired sampling density is expensive and often impractical.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,356,830 issued to Adamchuk et al. describes a soil collection system having a tray or platform that is dipped into the soil to collect a soil sample and then raised to bring the collected soil into contact with a pH probe. The '830 patent also includes provisions for geo-referencing the pH data. The present invention has been developed as an improvement to the soil sampling system described in the '830 patent and to satisfy a need in the industry for an improved on-the-go soil collection system that overcomes the problems of the prior art.